The days when all a business’s needs could be met with a single app are behind us. Enterprise mobility has undergone a metamorphosis, and your IT department must evolve with it. Otherwise, you can wave goodbye to your competitors as they leave you in the dust.

A webinar hosted by BlackBerry Product Marketing director Michael Khalili and Senior Technical Solutions Manager Gregg Ginsberg explored the underlying cause of mobility’s evolution. Good Work: A New Way to Mobilize offers a comprehensive overview of the new application landscape of the business world, along with what a business must do to adapt. It all starts with a change in focus.

1. Our Mobility Focus Has Shifted

Older mobile solutions were primarily built to fit the needs of IT. Since there was no means of making multiple applications work together efficiently, monolithic, one-size-fits-all apps were the norm.

“Mobility is now really more about the user experience, and how employees interact with the applications they’re given,” Khalili explains. “The question now becomes less one of ‘how do we consolidate everything into one app’ and more ‘how do we bring our solutions together in a way that makes users productive?’”

2. Our Workflows have Transformed

“People are moving towards much broader, more collaborative workflows,” says Khalili. “How do I make email and mobile messaging work together? How do I get documents that are coming through email from my own internal content repositories and make them accessible across devices? These are the questions we’re seeing.”

3. Application Complexity Is On the Rise (And Integration Has Improved)

Most modern employee workflows now incorporate multiple mobile apps, and it’s rare for any two of those apps to be from the same source. Without integration, this leads to both unnecessary complexity and a disjointed user experience.

“Enterprises have components potentially coming from multiple vendors, ISVs, and internal developers,” Khalili says. “A modern context demands very different application architecture from the monolithic apps of yesterday.”

4. Mobile Deployments Are Growing Larger

Five years ago, a large mobile deployment might consist of a few thousand users or devices. Today, as enterprises embrace 100% mobilization, we’re seeing deployments in the tens and hundreds of thousands.

“In the past, we were kind of shoehorning mobility into apps that weren’t designed for it,” says Khalili. “It’s a lot smoother now, which helps a great deal with scalability in larger deployments.”

5. Deployment Requirements Have Changed

In the past, enterprise application deployments adhered to the same monolithic design as applications, and on-premises was the only option. Then the cloud came along.

“There are very different requirements today as opposed to four or five years ago,” Khalili explains. “The cloud has really changed what the architecture of a collaboration app on a phone looks like, and what the app experience looks like. Many businesses now seek the ability to deploy on-premises in the cloud.”

How Good Work Enables a Better Approach to Collaboration

Good Work is the perfect tool for addressing the challenges of the new enterprise climate, says Khalili. Designed with multi-app workflows and the end user in mind, it differentiates itself from its competitors in several key ways:

A True Mobile Desktop: Good Work is integrated with platforms like Microsoft Office to allow you to do everything you could on a desktop PC.

Better Contacts, Better Collaboration: A more powerful, personalized inbox offers a number of productivity-enhancing features such as rich contact cards and integrated presence/photos.

Streamlined IT Infrastructure: Good Work is resource-light, and integration with BlackBerry’s larger portfolio makes implementation of additional solutions easy.

Work Better With Files: Single-tap, contextual menus allow users to easily work with documents and files both as attachments and while in storage. Good Work can also leverage many different document storage solutions, regardless of location: locally on the device, enterprise systems both on-premise and in the cloud, or 3rd-party cloud-based systems. Employees can access the files they need, when they need them.

The webinar concludes with a demo of Good Work followed by a brief Q&A session which addresses some of the following questions:

What does Good Work offer for smaller deployments?

Where does Good Work slot into the Good Secure EMM Suites?

How will BES/Good integration impact server structure?

How does Good Work handle servers and server roles differently from Good for Enterprise?

About Nicholas C. Greene

Nicholas C. Greene is a technology writer based in Calgary, Canada. An English graduate of the University of Calgary, he's written for publications and organizations such as VPN Haus, Streetwise, Northcutt, and The Coolist.

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